Re-Matched
by eilonwya10
Summary: Growing up in Camas Province, Maura faces the key decision of whether to be Matched or Single. But with the Society's grip failing, decisions don't hold the way they used to.
1. Chapter 1: Sixteen and Three Quarters

**A/N: The Matched universe is the creation of Ally Condie. Original characters; possible spoilers through _Reached_.**

* * *

Our Personal and Physical Health instructor, Mr. Enochs, grins as he hands out the Match brochures.

"Read these thoroughly," he says. He doesn't need to. Whether to be Matched or be Single is the most important decision—the _only_ decision—on our path to adulthood. The fragile port-paper that's dry under my fingers will crumble to dust in a matter of weeks, but my choice will last the rest of my life.

Outside at lunch, in the thin autumn air, we sit at the hard fiber tables with our foil-wrapped lunches, trying to squeeze our uncertainties into the twenty minutes that's optimal for eating.

The schedule says we have forty-five, but everybody knows somebody who's been called in for psych evaluation after sitting too long over a meal. Liane's already checked out one of the soft red rubber balls we use for the dodging game. She bounces it absently against the dry ground.

"It says to consider carefully whether being Matched is right for us," she says. "But how do we know?"

"'Healthy psychological adjustment is best achieved in the context of family relationships,'" I quote from Mr. Enochs' lecture. The breeze off the distant purple mountains pushes my hair in my face again. It's pale and fly-away, unlike Liane's shiny, dark curls. I wish I could ask her to braid it for me, like she did when we were kids.

"Hey, Maura, I was awake for that," Liane says. "That's a generalization, like saying, 'a successful sort achieves optimal results for all members of the data set.' Where are the guidelines for how you know what's optimal?"

Tom Lowry interrupts, leaning forward over the spiky elbows he's propped on the table. "It means only Aberrations aren't Matched."

"No, it doesn't." I pin a paragraph with my finger. "It says right here that our Leader is a Single. The Leader's not an Aberration."

Liane presses her lips together like she's hiding a joke, but all she says is: "Lots of Singles have responsible jobs. My mother's supervisor at the livestock facility—"

"That doesn't mean they're not Aberrations. If an Aberration's got skills that are tough to duplicate. . ." Tom pushes back black hair that's always flopping in his eyes. "I'm just saying, if you don't choose to be Matched, people will wonder. They're always going to wonder."


	2. Chapter 2: Almost Seventeeen

"History is what happened," I say to Liane. "It doesn't change. It just is."

We're at the games center, facing off over a board of light gray and dark gray markers. Winner connects the markers into walls that fence the other player in. I have the advantage: my future work assignment's going to involve routing trains or food trucks, or maybe managing the sewage pipe system, so I spend my work hours connecting dots on a computer screen.

Liane moves a marker, and I have to focus. She's playing dark gray, but the marker's an undistinguished beige, and I've been subconsciously treating it as mine. It's hers, though: a river pebble used to replace a lost piece that the game center Officials haven't seen as important enough to replace.

"But how do we know?" she asks. "Some of the Hundred History Lessons are so long ago that there's no video or anything."

"We know because we have the facts. I don't know how you're so patient with the thirteen-year-olds, but the facts should be the easy part."

"I was a thirteen-year-old, once," Liane says. She squeezes my hand, fast, soft and warm. "I don't know how you're so patient with grotty old pipes."

"Grotty old predictable, logical pipes." I'm proud of my next move. I'm going to have her cornered, and she'll lose that marker. "It's the food trucks that I need more practice on. One family goes out to a private dining hall, and I have to redo the whole route to get optimal results."

"I've always wondered. What do you do if a truck's behind schedule?"

"I look for why, and then I fix the why." My glance is caught by a group of Officers headed for the ping-pong tables. Their faces above olive-green uniforms are soft-edged, like the boys at school: they can't be much older than we are. Maybe that's why the Official checks their passes so carefully.

As she thinks over her move, Liane twists her thick mass of dark curls and knots it at the back of her head. It stays on its own, making her look older somehow, stripped-down and serious. "How do you know the why?"

"There are places to look. If there's been a storm, the first thing to do is check the cameras over the access road for branches that Maintenance and Sanitation missed. If not, then there's the maintenance record on the truck. Is it almost due for tuning and replacement, so maybe something broke early?"

I move another piece. This part of the wall looks disconnected, off on its own. Liane won't see how it joins to the rest until it's too late for her to react. "Then there's the delivery worker's record. Has she—or he—gotten citations for being slow or stopping to talk with friends? Is there a house on the route that has a lot of special needs, where maybe an order got switched? It's things like that. There's a checklist, but after a while, you just know."

"That's neat. It really is." Where I expected Liane to advance, she pushes a marker backward. "So what I want to know is, how do people do that for history? How do they figure out the why of things coming out the way they did?"

It's like asking how we know the rules of the games, or why students like us wear brown while the workers wear blue. "They don't. It's done. They figured it out, and now we know what happened. We don't have to go back and do it again every day, like the food trucks."

"Maybe if we did it now, we wouldn't get the same answers." She's talking so low I have to lean forward to hear her over the cheers and chatter at the tables around us. By the ping-pong tables, one of the Officers is consulting with a trio of Officials. "What if the people who founded the Society had recorded their thoughts while it was happening, and we could see them? Or maybe the thoughts of the people who opposed them?"

I can't repress a shudder. "It'd be the days of chaos all over again. Nobody could make sense of all that. They just listened to the people who agreed with them and yelled at the ones who didn't, until everybody was armed and determined to get their way, and nobody cared about getting the right answer."

Whatever awkward question is lurking behind Liane's brown eyes is lost when one of the Officials blows her whistle. "Nobody move," she says, in the tone Officials use to blast their authority across a crowd. "We need to re-check your passes. It will only take a minute."

Liane settles back in her chair and lifts one of her markers—and looks up at the young Officer, whose hand has closed around her wrist. "Nobody move," he repeats.

"It's the game. I'm not going anywhere."

I place my hands flat on the edge of the table to show I'm cooperating. Liane and the Officer are having a staring contest, his blue eyes against her brown. He lets go of her wrist, slowly. Only after she's set her hand on the table, nowhere near the markers, does he ask for my pass.

"Maura Ann Goldwater." He repeats my name as if he has to think about the syllables. "Your hair's lighter in the photo."

"It was summer." I can barely get the words out. He's not the first Officer I've talked with—they come from the military bases on errands to Camas City all the time—but there's something in his clipped speech that makes me feel like I've committed an infraction.

He asks for my address, which I stumble through, then hands back my pass and holds out his hand for Liane's. She moves very slowly in pulling it from the one shallow pocket we always have—the one for our pill case and our passes—and she doesn't meet his eyes now.

"Liane Teresa Smith." When she doesn't respond, he says: "We've got a report that you were here for three hours this afternoon."

"I was at work. I've got twenty seventh-years to vouch for me. That's assuming they didn't all sleep through their history lesson."

"It must be a mistake in the database," he says. It's as if he's suddenly deflated. Officials are still checking passes all around us, but we're released. The Officer winks at me, and he's a boy like me, not even a year older.

He hands the pass back to Liane, and I must be imagining things—but for a moment, it looks like there's a second _something_ that goes from his hand to hers, almost hidden under the pass.


	3. Chapter 3: Seventeen and Three Months

"Maura Ann Goldwater."

When the Official says my name, I stand, shaking out my unfamiliar blue silk dress and hoping nobody can see that I was caught off-guard, with a bite of chocolate cake still in my mouth. I want to smooth my hair, as if that could remind me of Liane's soothing fingers braiding it, but there's no time. The camera will already be on me, beaming my image to some boy in another city, maybe even another province.

I look up at the screen, waiting for his image to appear. Blond, brunet, redhead? Fair-skinned or swarthy? Talkative or quiet? Will he be in one of the Sorting professions, like me, or a teacher like Liane, or something else entirely?

"Maura Goldwater, your Match is Ethan Harper." He's dark-haired like Liane, with brown eyes. In the moment the image lasts, he looks as if he's seeking something. Me?

One of the Officials puts the silver box with the microcard in my hand and I sit, feeling as if I've stumbled on the stairs to the air train platform. There's the same sense of breathlessly hitting some solid surface without knowing quite how I got there.

Ethan Harper. I'm going to spend most of my life with Ethan Harper.

"He'll grow into his looks," my mother whispers. "Your father did. At our first meeting, I thought your father was going to fall right over me, he was such a mess of knees and elbows. By the time of our Contract, he was the handsomest man at City Hall that day."

My father squeezes her hand. I've never thought about whether he's good-looking. I get my height from him, and I wouldn't have my flyaway blond hair without him, but the long nose and the sorting ability are all from my mother.

When I try to visualize Ethan Harper's face, his features get mixed up with Liane's.

On the air train going home, I hold a strap and stand so my parents can sit, and I find myself next to a face that's half-familiar. I try to visualize it above something other than a suit with a blue tie: not Official white, since he's dressed for the Match Banquet and holding his silver box. Not student brown. . . Officer green.

Of course. The military base is past our borough, on the same line.

"You were at the game center a couple months ago," I say because we're almost nose to nose, and I've been staring at him.

"You were with Liane Smith." He seems to catch himself an instant after speaking, pulling himself together with a blush, as if he's talking about his Match. For a senseless second, I want to say _No, Liane is mine. That was my moment. Not yours._

But Liane's not mine. Ethan Harper is mine. This Officer is someone else's—whatever girl goes with the microcard in his silver box—and Liane's chosen to be a Single.

She's waiting when we get off the train, even though it's almost curfew. Tom Lowry's with her, laughing at something under the pinpoint stars.

"Aren't you cold?" is the first sentence out of Liane's mouth, and I realize I am. It was a warm afternoon for spring when we left for the Banquet, but the night air is sharp with the memory of winter. She throws an arm around my bare shoulders, then thinks better of it and lends me her gray coat instead. The coat covers more of me, without making me crouch and slump, but I liked the feel of her arm better.

"What's he like?" Tom asks. He was the first of our crowd to be Matched—to a girl named Julia from Tana Province, with hair the color of our student plainclothes and an expected work assignment in Nutrition.

"He's. . . he's got black hair like Liane's." That's all I have. The image flashed so quickly on the screen. I wonder what Ethan Harper remembers of me. Blue silk? Pale hair? What expression did he see on my face before I vanished?

"She's only just seen him for a couple seconds," Liane says. "Are you okay, Maura?"

"Of course. I'm happy. I've been Matched."

"Isn't it great?" Tom's walking so fast he's gotten ahead of us, so he turns to walk backwards, then trips over a rough bit of sidewalk and has to catch himself in a tumble of elbows, knees, and dark hair. "The instant I saw Julia, I knew that's the one."

"Hearing your name called might have been a broad hint," Liane says.

"You won't know what it feels like until you try it. You've got a few months to change your mind, Liane. Don't waste it."

This is a familiar argument, repeated every time Tom gets a new fragment of data about Julia. "I know who I am" is all Liane says.

I don't want Tom to treat this as the opening for another skirmish, so I tell Liane: "I saw your Officer on the train. The one from the games center, when we all had our passes checked."

She shakes her head. "I don't remember." But we pass under a street lamp, and there's more color in her face than usual.

"He'd just been Matched." I'm not sure if I'm delivering bad news or good news or no news at all. They spoke only that once.

"That's usually why people are at Match Banquets." We've made it back to our block—rows of little houses, all alike, with three shuttered windows to the front, five steps to the door, and the yellow flowers of a cottonthorn bush blooming to the right of the path.

"Get yourself inside before you freeze," Liane says as she takes her coat back. Somehow, I've kissed her on the cheek and she's held me very tight for a second, as if we're clinging to the last minutes of our youth.

I'm barely in the door before my parents have caught up with me. "Sleepclothes before you do one more thing," my mother says.

"Of course," I say. My Match gown seems to have absorbed the chill in the air. Even in the house, where the temperature's always optimal, I don't quite feel warm. "I have homework to finish—"

My father winks. "Is _homework_ what they're calling it these days?"

"Those math problems where liquids drain down pipes at different speeds—"

My mother laughs. "Will be neglected, now that you've got a Match to swoon over. My parents almost got a citation because I didn't think to turn the foyer light off. An Official knocking on the door at two in the morning just about scared me out of my skin."

I can't tell them how I crave the certainty and order of the calculus problems. I'm curious about Ethan Harper, I really am. Everyone at school tomorrow will want to know about him. I just. . . want the ground solidly underneath my feet first.

My room, which is one of the windows that faces front, is just large enough for the single bed and the closet that holds three changes of plainclothes and one of sleepclothes. I set my silver box on the bed, kick off my shoes, and then lift my arms to let the blue silk slide like water over me and away. It shimmers on the floor like a puddle after summer rain. If I hold it to my face, it's more like air, or the flutter of falling leaves.

It seems obscurely wrong to wear anything else while this dress is here, as if I'm somehow rejecting what it means, who it makes me. But that's what I'm supposed to do, so I pull on my sleepclothes, and I hang the dress in the closet so it won't wrinkle before it goes back to the Clothing Distribution Center.

When I pad back into the sitting room—our little houses don't have foyers—the only illumination is the blue glow of the port. That's my mother's gift for me. I don't have to worry about Officials waking the family because there's a light burning when it shouldn't be.

My heart's pounding as if I've been playing the ball-dodging game when I fumble the microcard out of its silver box to insert it into the port's reader.

The familiar seal of Camas Province—mountain peak, grain sheaf, cattle horns, a chunk of the rock that fuels our power plants, and a sprig of the purple flower that gives the province its name—stays on the screen long enough for me to think to pull my mother's armchair in front of the port so I can sit.

_Maura Ann Goldwater, the Society is pleased to present your Match._

And there's Ethan Harper. His middle name is Brice.

He's squinting in the formal photo, as if he'd been faced into the sun. But he's smiling, and it gives him dimples.

His hair really is as dark as Liane's, and it's just as curly. His skin's a milky shade of pale, lighter than hers. I can't tell his eye color, but the card reassures me that it's brown. He's three inches taller than I am and five weeks younger.

_Has always lived in Borcay City, Acadia Province._

_Favorite color: Yellow._

_Future occupation: Maintenance and Sanitation worker._

_Likelihood of becoming an Official: 4.26%._

_Favorite food: cranberry sauce._

We get cranberry sauce in our dinners two or three times a year, always in the fall. When I was little, before my older brother had his Contract, I used to sneak my spoonfuls of the tart and bitter jelly to him in return for an extra bite of creamed sweet potato. Now I swallow it fast, before I eat anything else, tasting it as little as I can.

_Favorite leisure activity: games of chance._

_Percentage of classmates who named Ethan Harper as the person they most admire: 12.37%._

I scroll through the list to the end, then back to the top and do it over. Twice. Three times. On the fourth repeat, I go all the way back to the photo. His smile is nice. It's a kind smile, the smile of a person who laughs easily.

My mother says he'll grow into his looks.

The Society says he's perfect for me.

Ethan Harper and I have nothing in common.

If he's my perfect Match, what does that say about me?


	4. Chapter 4: The Next Day

"He'll broaden my horizons," I tell Liane and Tom. It's a senseless metaphor, out here where the skies stretch forever toward the distant mountains. The horizon in Camas Province is so broad that sometimes I want to cling to the earth.

"What are you going to talk about on your first port contact?" Tom asks. "Sewage?" He swings his arms as we walk up the long street from the air train stop to the Museum.

"I like sewage. Pipes are a lot easier to manage than food trucks. They stay put."

Liane pets my back, just once, too fast for our Culture and Civics teacher to see. Our field trip to the Museum is the kind of surprise that has Mrs. Tucker muttering to herself about syllabuses and schedules and how we're ever to be ready for this year's achievement testing if we take a day out of class right in the middle of spring.

"Yeah, but he'd be down in it," Tom says. "Like _touching_ it."

"Not really." I start to explain about valves and operations, about how somebody has to make sure the actions I program into the computer happen, but Liane's talking over me. "Can't we just be happy for Maura?"

"I'm happy. I'm happy. I just think it's funny, that's all. You don't think of those people being Matched with people we know."

My defense of Ethan—that his work needs doing, that there's no shame if he's _good_ at it, that we all contribute to an optimal Society—is lost in the sonic boom of a triangle of planes flashing overhead. Most of the line of classmates stop to wave, as if the pilots can see us down here, a trail of ants winding among blocky pale buildings. Camas City doesn't soar as tall as Central or even Oria City, but it's probably all the same to the pilots. Their eyes are on the horizon, not on the ground below.

Liane rubs a toe against a crack in the sidewalk where careless maintenance has allowed yellow flowers bloom on spiky stems. Tom watches the planes until they vanish into the pale blue place where sky meets mountains.

"We're behind schedule," Mrs. Tucker says. "Double time. No straggling!"

The pace she sets leaves little breath for talking. Our civic buildings are set a minimum of one-quarter kilometer apart, with greenspaces or paved kortos in between. _So that we don't spread illness like they did before the Warming,_ Mrs. Tucker told us, many lessons ago. Our streets are at least fifteen meters wide, for the same reason. Even here at the city center, bicycle traffic is light and there are only two delivery trucks in sight.

The Museum building is from the times-before: a two-story red-brick rectangle, flanked by long, low, windowless wings. The flat pillars between the windows—and the stripes of protruding brick that wrap beneath the roof—stop short of the kind of decadence that gets a building demolished.

"It's a required school trip," Mrs. Tucker says to the Official who insists on checking each of our passes individually. He shakes his head, shoves another pass into his port, waits for it to be spit out, and hands it back.

"Heightened security levels," is all he says.

Any whisper earns a glare from our teacher, so I pass the time by trying to imagine what security a Museum could possibly need. I've heard the Museum's a popular spot for Matched couples on their official visits: admiring the reproductions of the Hundred Paintings is a way to get out of earshot of doting parents and supervising Officials. Other than that, the only people who come here are school groups on our mandatory visits.

This time, it's to see a new exhibit on the history of Matching. It has a hall to itself in the low wing to the left: video screens and long glass cases full of Artifacts. We're given headphones so we can hear the narration at each stop.

_While the errors of the time before the Crash were many, none did so much damage to civilization as the practice of choosing one's own life partner. Although marriage—as it was called then—was supposed to last the entire adult life, just as our Contract does, more than half of all marriages failed, many within the first ten years._

The video shows a pig-tailed girl sobbing as a man kisses her through the window of some kind of vehicle. There's a woman behind the wheel, not in Official white—the girl's mother? Her mother is taking her away from her father?

_As a result, many children were shuttled between the homes of two parents or lost contact with one parent entirely. Even more children were born outside of lawful marriage. Crime, poverty, and decadence grew with each generation._

The first case displays a Match Banquet dress, only in Official white, which makes no sense. The Match Banquet takes place before we're old enough to become Officials, and we don't wear the colors of our plainclothes anyway. It makes no sense, but there it is—glossy satin, covered with lace and pearls, with a skirt that must have trailed for meters behind.

"How'd girls see around that?" Liane whispers, pointing to the frothy thing that's topped with more pearls. There's a ring, too, with a big clear stone.

_As the meaning of marriage was forgotten, the celebration became increasingly decadent. Women expected men to spend almost a quarter-year's salary—the primitive means of assuring food and shelter—on the ring that signified the decision to be matched with each other. The dress for the banquet, the banquet itself, and the gifts for the married couple consumed resources that could have found more optimal uses._

The next display makes me squirm. It's bad enough to see paper books, which spread germs and incorrect ideas in the times-before. The covers make it even worse. A few are just girls in their Match Banquet gowns, staring wistfully at the viewer. It's the rest, the ones where the girl's being clutched by a man with long hair and no shirt. . . or where there's no girl at all, just shiny naked male flesh. . . I can't look at these. I really can't.

_To justify the waste, an industry formed around the ideal of finding the perfect partner. Yet all of the stories relied on luck, fate, and other concepts that an enlightened society rejects. The result was widespread dissatisfaction with the realities of the partnering process, combined with artificially limited opportunities for meeting potential partners._

A photo of a young woman appears on the next screen. She's standing against a tile wall, like in a hygiene room, holding out a datapod. Below her picture, there's the same kind of information we get on our microcards: favorite color, favorite recreation, favorite food. The screen changes to another girl before I can read them, then another and another and another.

_In the days before the final collapse of the decadent old culture, people entered their profiles into databases that were supposed to help them find an optimal partner. While most of these partnering efforts failed, the founders of our Society saw the potential for implementing a scientific means for achieving lasting pairings._

The display changes to what I recognize as a sorting interface. The data's unencoded, so we can see the meaning of how the sorter's dark-skinned hand moves. I know from my own training that this is an exponential pairwise match. Appearance, leisure preferences, slews of genetic and psychological data: each property is ranked for importance and each contains multiple categories. Getting an optimal fit is like mentally tossing six or seven of the dodging-game balls in the air and trying to keep all of them moving. I'm much happier with sewage pipes.

_The Matching process replaces chance with certainty and emotion with science. Physical and emotional compatibility for achieving a stable family environment is now assured by giving the greatest weight to the factors most likely to contribute to the desired outcome._

Another screen shows a crowd of people in Officer green. They're grinning and holding hands: five couples.

_Under wartime conditions, the military were swift to see the benefits of the new Matching process. They pronounced the results optimal. Of more than two hundred couples in the first batch, only one asked to dissolve the Match. Investigation determined that one partner had been misclassified and was an Aberration._

The row of boxes starts with a plain white rectangle of folded paper. Next are three small wooden boxes of different designs, then a tarnished silver box, then a silver box that's bright and new.

_The first few rounds of Matching were so experimental that the microcard was delivered in a simple envelope. This proved too ephemeral a way to honor the importance of Matching in our Society. It was quickly determined that silver is the color most psychologically conducive to the appropriate emotional responses surrounding the Match._

"What does that even mean?" Liane whispers. I shake my head. Tom starts to say something, but Mrs. Tucker glares at us.

The next screen shows a Match Banquet, but the dresses are a style different from any I saw. So many of the crowd are clearly over seventeen that I wonder how many are older siblings. Then a name is called and a woman who's almost my mother's age stands. Her Match is equally old. "Ew," one of my classmates squeals, and I can't help agreeing.

_As the Society built our glorious and secure civilization, it was initially necessary to Match to within five years of maximum childbearing age for women. It is an achievement that for two full generations, we have been able to eliminate overage Matching and to pair all Citizens properly at age seventeen._

The final screen shows a line of young couples at City Hall, making their Contracts. They enter holding hands and leave smiling. The entire wall beside the screen is a diagram of colored lines—like the sewer lines or the complicated paths the food trucks take, but thousands of times larger and more complicated.

It's a family tree of all of Camas Province. There are no names, just numbers. Two lines come together for a Matched couple. Two lines depend from the couple—one boy, one girl—then split and go their own way to their own Matches. Tracing a line from generation to generation is impossibly complex, yet so tempting that I want to run a finger along the wall and do it.

_Matching has now provided physical and emotional compatibility for millions of couples, resulting in stable family units, healthy children, and a productive society. Matching: science at work for an optimal future._

The Anthem of the Society plays, and of course we all stand in front of the giant family tree and sing along.

"Thirty minutes to look at whatever exhibits you choose," Mrs. Tucker says.

We'll be watched, of course, just as we're watched at the games center or the swimming pool. Going to see the Hundred Paintings means one thing. Going to the Natural Science display with the rocks and animal skeletons means another.

"Let's go see the history of Camas Province," Liane says. The history exhibit is what we're brought to see in seventh-year, so I'm surprised she wants to spend more time there, but she's almost vibrating with eagerness.

Other than one Official, we're the only people in the echoing space. Now that we're here, I like the case that contains a scale model of Camas City, with the video above it that shows hold the decadent buildings of the before-times were cleared to create the healthy, rational city we have now.

Liane gives the case one look, then strides toward the wall map of the entire Society. Camas Province is colored in pale blue, with a wheat sheaf and a bull. We're the final, west-pointing finger of the Society. Beyond and below us, the Outer Provinces sprawl. Behind us are the Farmlands that our planes protect.

Central sits at a cleft in the continent formed by a finger of lake—no, it's not a finger. It's one of the three petals of the wild iris that grow in the mountains. One petal points down to Central, and the other two arch to either side. I find Ethan's Acadia Province way at the northeastern extreme of the map, bounded by ocean, with a red-clawed insect protecting its border.

The Official approaches. He's about my father's age, with crinkles around friendly eyes. "Would you like me to tell you more about the history of Camas?" he asks.

Liane starts to push back her dark curls, then tips her head so they hide her face. "Yes."

There isn't much. Shamefully, the territories that became Camas Province had threatened to go their own way in the early days of the Society. The military had to crack down on that. Worse might have happened if the Warming hadn't brought eighty days of blizzard to close the mountain passes to the Otherlands.

"Reason prevailed," the Official finishes. "Since that time, Camas Province has improved its socio-cultural rating from a five-year average of 52.63 to its most recent five-year average of 76.20. Camas Province is a major producer of energy for the Society, as well as the second-largest source of beef. What can I help you with?"

"I was told there's more to know," Liane says.

The Official leans close to us and speaks low. "I might be driven to sell your love for peace or trade the memory of this night for food." It has the feel of a poem, but it's not one of the Hundred Poems.

Liane pulls an off-white rectangle from the sleeve of her brown plainclothes. The Official reaches for it, but she pulls it away and unfolds it, slowly. It's paper, visibly heavier than port-paper. I can see printed words, but there's something wrong with the letters. Instead of being the clear, straight lines we see on our ports, each letter has parts that are thicker and others that are thinner, with little triangles and ledges at the edges. It's the kind of printing that the times-before could have produced: uniform and mechanical on the surface, but hiding the seeds of decadence.

"That might get you some knowledge," the Official says. "I'll see what I can do." He reaches for the paper.

She pulls it further back, still keeping the printing toward him. "No. I'm not giving it up until I know I can get something in return."

"That's not how it works."

"That's how it works for me."

They stare at each other long enough for me to wonder if their hearts are pounding like mine is. Whatever's happening here, it's outside the norm, and things outside the norm lead to citations, if not Infractions.

"Come back in a week," the Official says. "Not before then."

Liane nods, refolds the paper, and tucks it into her sleeve. As we leave the exhibit—our time's up, we have to hurry—I sort through the possible questions and ask the one with the most immediate impact on my life. "Why did you bring me?"

"So you'll know how to do it later, if you ever need to." She cuts off my next question with a hand on my cheek. "You'll know if the need comes, I promise. It's to keep you safe, and that's all I can tell, okay?"

* * *

**A/N: The Society's history of marriage does not represent my own views on our present-day culture. The statement that "has the feel of a poem" is from Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love Is Not All." **


	5. Chapter 5: Two Weeks Later

"Hiya," Ethan says from the port.

My own "hello" feels too formal now, but "hi" or "hey" seems wrong for my first words to the person I'm going to spend the rest of my life with.

I wish the Official who'd started this communication would stay visible and ask us questions or _something,_ but we're on our own. The Officials only watch, to make sure our courtship is proceeding at a normal and psychologically healthy pace.

"I'm Maura," I say.

"I know." The light from the port gives his milky skin a bluish cast and makes his curly hair look like a tangle of coated wire. The room behind him—what little I can see—is just like our sitting room, except that the picture on the wall is Number 63 in the Hundred Paintings, the white lighthouse on a hill. Ours is Number 89, the patch of irises against a gold screen.

"How's school?" I ask because I have to say something. He'll say it's fine, but maybe he'll ask a question.

"Done. Done. I got my vocation last week."

My embarrassment must be visible as heat in my cheeks. We get assigned when there's a job opening that we're ready for, so the people who need less schooling for their vocations tend to go first.

"It's great," he goes on. "I get to drive a street-cleaning machine. We go all night. Vroom!"

"I. . . okay. That sounds great."

"Maybe I'll get permission to take you for a ride when you come to visit. There's hills on my route, so you go up real slow, kinda zigzaggy, and then you get to go down real fast. It's totally optimal!"

"Sure. Uh. . . sure."

"So you're still stuck in a classroom?"

"Yeah." If I say I like it, I'm starting our future by pointing out how different we are. I wish my mother or father would interrupt—tell me it's time for dinner, tell me I have to do my homework, anything—but nobody interrupts required Matching activities.

"You have pretty hair," Ethan says.

"So do you. You have a nice smile."

"My mama says you'll grow into your looks."

"That's what mine says about you."

The things I suddenly want to ask—what did you think when you saw me? did you like me? were you disappointed? did you expect a girl who's more like you?—can't be asked with an Official listening. They aren't even real questions. He's my Match, and so he's optimal for me. We're optimal for each other.

"What's your favorite game?" I ask because one of us has to say something.

His smile really is nice, with full lips and dimples. "Chutes and ladders. We'll have to play."

"Uh huh. Mine's Go." His is a children's game where the dice-roll tells you how many squares to move. If you land on a ladder, you get a short-cut toward the goal. If you land on a chute, you slide back toward where you started. The ladders are labeled with the proper behaviors of a Citizen: reliability, use of reason, loyalty, diligence, and accuracy.

The chutes point the way to becoming an Aberration: disobedience, vanity, vulgarity, theft, lying, gluttony, rage, greed, pride, and violence.

"Is that what you call Go Fish out in Camas?" Ethan asks.

"No. . . but Go Fish is fun, too. We'll play it. Chutes and ladders is kind of like what I do to train for my vocation, only there's no dice. I'm classified as a Sorter, but the part I really like is routing and troubleshooting things. Food trucks or trains or sewage pipes." It all comes out in a rush that says _please like me._

For a second, he has that searching look in his eyes again. "I like it that you do sewage pipes. We'd be a mess if those didn't work."

"There'd be pollution in the streets."

"And I'd have to clean it up. I'm going to think of you as the girl who makes sure I don't have to shovel sh—waste products."

"I'm going to think of you as the guy who'd have to clean up after me if I screwed up."

Maybe this is how love starts, with the discovery that you contribute something to each other.

The form on the screen, after the port-to-port communication ends, tells me to rate the interaction on five dimensions, using a one-to-five scale, one being _strongly untrue_ and five being _strongly true_.

_My Match treats me with respect._ **4**

_I enjoyed this time I've spent with my Match._ **4**

_My Match takes an interest in my life._ **5**

_My Match communicates openly and clearly._ **5**

_I feel love for my Match._

I don't know. If I put what I feel right now, which is maybe 3 (neutral), is that normal psychological progress, or would I be saying my Match isn't perfect for me? If I put 5, am I rushing the process or am I saying what the monitoring Official wants to hear?

* * *

**A/N: The first four questions are modified from Columbia Health's Go Ask Alice session on healthy relationships.**


	6. Chapter 6: Seventeen and Four Months

The screen in our Personal and Physical Health class zaps into noise and motion just as Mr. Enochs is announcing the date when an Official from the Matching Department will visit to tell us about the qualities we should develop if we want a successful Contract.

"She will not answer questions about the physical side of Contracting," he says. Nobody will, not until the month before the Contract itself. What we don't know about, we can't do.

Before I can figure out if I'm sorry or relieved, the screen's on and it is happening.

The red brick building is the Museum. The doors are thrust open as two Officials wrestle a person out into the dusty spring morning. He's in white, with a ripped spot on his chest where his insignia used to be. His hands are cuffed in front of him. Blood trickles from a wound on his head. When he tries to look away from the camera, a third Official grabs his chin and points his face around so that we can all see him.

It's the Official who talked with Liane, the day she and I went to see the glorious history of Camas Province. If she went back the next week, she didn't tell me.

She sits a row behind me, so I can't see her reaction. I want to cover my eyes, but my hand lies on my desk like it's not even part of me, and I look back at the screen to see the man being bundled into a white van.

"Today, the intelligence of the Society has once again triumphed." The disembodied voice is sweet and cool. "Robert Skoglund, formerly an Official in the Civic Department, has been revealed as an Anomaly. He and his family will be transferred for rehabilitation to a more appropriate assignment in the Outer Provinces."

"Can't rehabilitate an Anomaly," Tom Lowry mutters. His hand is capable of motion. It's clenched into a fist.

The scene abruptly cuts to a borough like ours, except that the cottonthorn bush is to the left of the path. Officials lead a crying woman from a house. She's clutching the hands of a solemn, pale boy in his early teens and a pigtailed girl who won't let go of a stuffed elephant.

If Official—if Anomaly Robert Skoglund could spare his family by doing it, would he tell the Officials about Liane and me? I would, but I'm not an Anomaly. They don't _think_ like us. They don't want the same things. They could do _anything_—

The voice continues: "Anomalies wear the faces of our friends and neighbors to gain our trust. Be ever vigilant, Citizens!"

"There ought to be a way to just round them up and kill them all," Tom says.

My uncontrollable sob of fear somehow turns into a hiccup as the Anthem of the Society plays. I can stand up. I really can. My voice comes out as a croak and my knees tremble, but I'm standing and I'm singing.

If I take the green pill now, people will know something's wrong.

Under cover of the ruckus of twenty classmates sitting down again, I manage to sneak a look at Liane. _How much trouble are we in?_

She's smiling.

* * *

**A/N: Skoglund's children are a shout-out to _The Giver_.**


	7. Chapter 7: Later That Day

At my work training that afternoon, the air feels thick and ready for a storm, but the green pill I've taken puts a safe distance between me and the tension.

The best days at work are when I'm given a screen full of pipes or food trucks or any little icons that I have to move as fast as I can, routing them through complicated patterns to optimize their efficiency. Those days go by in a blur of motion.

This is not one of those days. This is a day when the blips move around the screen on their own, and it's my job to watch them and fix anything that goes wrong.

The hardest part of the four-hour shift is staying alert. For the first hour or so, my brain can amuse itself by finding the patterns in the movements. Once found, the patterns lull me. Thanks to the green pill, my mind's too numb to drift places I don't want it to go—the captured Anomaly's bleeding forehead, Liane's unexpected smile—so I float above the screen, one more blip moving through its patterns in an orderly universe.

When something goes wrong, it's sudden and catastrophic. The pattern cracks and snaps. The blips scatter, flowing outward from their paths in a random tide.

My fingers fly over the screen, rerouting movements, but the blips keep escaping. In the top right corner of the screen, a stream of monitoring information appears: flow pressure, break points, the locations of shut-off valves and repair trucks.

Getting uncoded, real-time data means this is an urgent scenario. Repair trucks are dispersed, far from the break points. I tap shut-off valves one after another, re-routing the flow always toward the water treatment plant.

Just as I complete the pattern, the water treatment plant goes off-line. There are holding tanks—but their icons on the screen flash into nonexistence, one by one. I've got to shut off inflow to the system. If this were a real emergency, not a simulation, a city would be losing most of its water service right now. All the ports, private and public, would flash messages:

Don't be in a rush to flush! Water system will be in test mode until further notice.

The rest of my shift passes in a blur of adjusting valves and re-routing repair trucks. For a heart-stabbing moment that goes on far too long, I think I'm going to have to release untreated sewage into the lake that supplies drinking water for this simulated city. That could foul up the water system for days, but my other choice is to let the dirty water overflow into the streets.

Then the water treatment plant comes back online.

I reroute flow at top speed because I can't help believing the treatment plant will vanish if I don't get things there, right now. This is the toughest simulation I've ever run. If I'm supposed to test the water treatment plant systems—if the trick is that it'd be lower-risk to use the lake and not send flow right into another treatment-plant shutdown—I'll fail this one. But it's someone else's job to monitor the treatment plant itself, and we lose points for interfering with other people's jobs.

The sewage is flowing along its adjusted routes as it should be. The changes hold for a minute. Another minute. My hands ache, and I'm holding my breath.

Nothing bad happens. The blips move in their new pattern.

If this was my final test for my work assignment, a team of Officials will emerge from the supervisor's one-way-glass cubicle to congratulate me for passing. I'm sure I've passed. There might even be a distribution of cookies. Sometimes that happens if the workgroup knew about the test in advance.

When I lean back and stretch, an Official is there, but she's frowning. The man in the next cubicle is older and grayer than the boy who sat there at the start of my shift. According to the clock on the wall by the supervisor's cubicle, it's more than two hours after I should have gone home.

"Please take out and open your tablet boxes," the Official says. I fumble mine from the shallow pocket in my plainclothes and have to scrabble under my work-surface to collect the passes I spill with it.

The Official walks along our gray line of cubicles. Explanations scurry through my head as I wait for her to ask why my green pill is missing, but she doesn't.

"Take the red pill and place it in the palm of your left hand."

Take the red pill. The green pill is for anxiety. The blue pill will keep you alive for a while if you're starving. Nobody knows what the red pill does.

It looks so small in my damp palm. Suicide pill, rumor says. But it can't be. No one would kill an entire workgroup.

"I will tell you when to take your pill." She walks along the cubicles again. This time, she stops for each of us. She watches while we each set the pill on the back of our tongue and swallow.

It slides down fast and easy.

I brush back my hair and look around as I wait to see what change will happen. The other workers blink and rub their eyes.

"That was a long shift," Tessa says. She's my parents' age and usually shares my shift. "We must be shorthanded again."

The gray-haired man on my other side nods. "It'll be good to get some of the trainees like Maura in here full-time. Lighten the load."

"Share the boredom, you mean. I can't remember a thing that's happened on this shift."

It makes sense that the broken sewer simulation was given only to me. . . but if that's the case, why did Tessa work late? Why is an Official here?

I don't feel any different. What does the red pill do?


End file.
